Belavia ahead of Lufthansa, KLM on Forbes Russia airline list

It is the first time that Forbes Russia has compiled such a list, the journal's website informs. “Experts of AviaPort Agency studied the quality of services provided by foreign companies in Russia, while the travel metasearch engine Aviasales analyzed the tariff policy specially for Forbes. In that way, we compared some foreign airlines based on the price to quality ratio,” the authors explained.

Forbes specialists confessed that they were surprised with the results: Belarusian airline Belavia was second only to Emirates. Polish airline Lot also ranked in top three, leaving behind KLM and Air France.

Forbes Russia clarified that they used Aviaport Agency's survey “Service in Russian Sky” as a basis of their evaluations. Disguised as passengers, Aviaport experts tested the quality of service of the airlines throughout all stages: from ticket purchase to getting off the plane. During the survey, they took more than 80 flights with the overall flight duration of 15 days. “We added one more important component of to Aviaport's observations, namely punctuality (statistics on Russian airlines were provided by Russian Federal Transport Agency, on foreign airlines – by flightstats.com),” Forbes informed.

In order to evaluate the pricing policy, the Russian travel metasearch engine Aviasales analyzed ticket sales of the selected airlines over 11 months of 2016 on nearly 500 flights and calculated an average ticket price for an adult passenger. “We divided the flights into groups depending on duration (12 groups on domestic routes and 12 groups on international routes) and compared pricing policies of the airlines in each group,” Forbes specialists said.

Belavia, the Belarusian national air carrier, currently operates 49 regular flights to 27 destinations in Europe, the CIS and Asia.